Friday, January 23, 2015

This fall, the Chicago Java User Group (CJUG) adopted JSR-366, the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE 8) Specification. To that end, the CJUG will be hosting periodic meetups to work on contributing towards Java EE 8. Our first meet with regards to this agenda was held on January 15, and we covered JSF 2.3 (JSR-372)...for beginners and advanced users. This meetup was geared towards anyone who wanted to contribute to Java EE 8 in some way, and we hosted two tracks during the meetup: "I Want to Learn JSF", and "I Want to Hack JSF"...beginner and advanced, respectively. Both of the tracks were well received.

I Want to Learn JSF Recap:

Bob Paulin, CJUG President, led the group through a tutorial that focused on building a simple JSF application using the NetBeans 8 IDE. Specifically, this tutorial led the group to building entity classes against some of the sample database tables, creating EJBs, and finally, generating JSF views to work with the data. The tutorial can be found here if you are interested in taking a look. The sources for the basic tutorial are in GitHub.

I Want to Hack JSF Recap:

I led the more advanced JSF track through a series of advanced tasks...digging into the Mojarra code a bit. First, we covered the basic steps to checkout the Mojarra 2.3 Milestone and trunk. We then covered the build process, and how to pull the sources into an IDE, such as NetBeans. Finally, we decided to dig into the code a bit and try to debug an existing JIRA issue, JAVASERVERFACES-3429. The team worked the issue, loading the test project into NetBeans and using the debugger to step through the code. We were able to reproduce the issue and pinpoint the cause of the problem to a specific method within the Mojarra sources. We were unable to determine the exact cause of the issue due to time constraints, but the group gained useful experience digging through the Mojarra sources.

The evening was a success, as we were able to spread information on how anyone can contribute to Java EE, even those who are new to the platform. We also sparked new interest in JSF, and presented some of the upcoming JSF 2.3 features.

Contributing

What are some of the ways you can contribute? How about the following, just to list a few:

1) Read through the documentation/specification and provide feedback.

2) Provide documentation for a specific JSR...perhaps work on the release notes for a particular milestone, write examples, or do a presentation.

3) Test against the milestone releases, and submit issues if any are found.

Again, this is just a short list of how anyone can get started contributing. I am looking forward to the next Adopt-a-JSR meetup for CJUG, and I look forward to hearing about your JUG's contribution towards making Java EE 8 great!